What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [32]
At the time Dana met her in 1990, Murray was on her way back to Kathmandu to found the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation. In the two decades since, it has aided more than 225,000 destitute children and opened orphanages, schools, and nine rehabilitation homes for severely malnourished children. It has also saved more than 4,300 girls, as young as six, from being sold as domestic slaves by trading pigs and goats for their freedom.
As she herself turned sixty, Dana turned to Murray’s inspiring example and to the adage that life is lived in thirds—first to learn, then to earn, and last to return. It became her mantra. Although she had not made a fortune by Wall Street standards, she had succeeded well enough to want to give back something to the world. Only she still had no idea what that “something” might be. She got into the habit of asking everyone she met if they had an idea for her.
In 2002, Dana met another woman who had precisely the idea she needed. After bumping into her at a crafts fair, Dana told Martha Virden Cunningham, founder of the Women’s Fund of New Hampshire, about her search for a mission to celebrate the start of her seventh decade. Cunningham had just finished David Bornstein’s book The Price of a Dream, and recommended to Dana that she read the story of Nobel peace laureate Muhammad Yunus. Possessed by the dream of eradicating poverty in the world, Yunus challenged conventional banking by establishing Grameen, a bank dedicated to giving the poorest Bangladeshis minuscule loans. Acting on his belief that credit is a basic human right, not just a privilege of the rich, and that even the poorest of people are entrepreneurial, Yunus and his bank have loaned more than two and a half billion dollars to more than two million families in Bangladesh. About 97 percent of the bank’s clients are women. “Compared to men, who spent money freely, women benefited their families much more,” he explained to Time magazine in 2008. His efforts have spawned hundreds of programs worldwide such as Dana’s WomensTrust. They, in turn, have made loans to some one hundred million people.
Exhilarated by the simplicity, potential, and power of the micro-finance model, Dana overturned a small library of literature. For six months, she read everything that she could, including Yunus’s autobiography Banker to the Poor. She networked everywhere possible and quizzed everyone she met. I can do this! she told herself. She had made her decision. She would go to Ghana and focus her efforts on women. Neither part of her decision was chance.
Back in the early 1960s, when Dana was a star student at Scripps College, the selective all-women’s college at Claremont, California, she wrote her honors thesis on Pan-Africanism as espoused by the first president of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. Dana believes that her interest in Africa originated with the worldwide attention focused on the Swiss philosopher physician Albert Schweitzer, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. He was lionized for dedicating his long life to the practice of medicine in Labarene, French Equatorial Africa, now Gabon, and magazines frequently ran stories on the hospital he built and how he used the money he received for the Peace Prize to add a leper colony to it. As an undergraduate, Dana’s interest allowed her to cobble together a major with courses examining the social, economic, and cultural issues at the moment that African nationalists were revolting against colonial rule and